"This train is a jiggle box.. a thing possessed of nervous demons, an epileptic taxi, a passenger elephant with flat feet & a peg leg." - Rick McKinney, Trained Wreck Welcome to Jigglebox.com, the epileptic taxi of my wild mind, a name born of a writing-frenzied insomniac x-country rail journey in 1997. Here is the living library of one writer's life, everything: A to Z. From Atypical prose to Poetic journalism to gonZo mad-hatter Rambling Rants. The five links above are seldom updated, and aside from this page, all mail links are old. I am a writer, not a webmaster, though I continue to code this site myself, by hand. The real treasure trove of this site is its Rants, my fingerprint-unique style of writing similar to Gonzo but not the same. Click HERE to read about & order yourself a copy of the happy result of a decade-long spell of non-publication finally broken, my first published book Dead Men Hike No Trails. I've been banging my head on this cyberwall since long before blogs were blogs, and it's all here. So join me for a ride down The Rabbit Hole, a labyrinth of over half a million words of hope, tears, laughter, love, introspection & inspiration. Enjoy! - Lord Duke Write Me! Changes This site was born in June of 1999. A lot has changed since then. It really got rolling in early '02 while I was living in New Orleans working on Mardi Gras floats with artist Julian Stock. I posted almost daily rants then. The next couple of years were great creatively. Then in late 2003 the first in a string of suicides & other premature death among friends hit me hard. Two years later I published Dead Men Hike No Trails. It's a great story about a really depressed guy who heals himself by walking 2000 miles in the mountains of Appalachia. Alas, just weeks after the book came out in January 2006, another friend died of a self-inflicted gun shot wound just hours after asking me to come over. I'd said no. She'd been shooting up, and I'd had a bad feeling. Her suicide, the third in three years, unhinged me. I flipped out, lost a whole year. The book suffered, getting no promotion whatsoever in its first year. Years passed. I drank and got heavily addicted to the sedative clonazepam. I kept writing, but the explosion of blogs intimidated me exacerbating depression, and I nearly quit publishing altogether. More time passed. In 2010, after a 900-mile failed bid to repeat & reclaim the natural high of my first long hike, this time on the Pacific Crest, I said "I'm done." I remember telling my cousin, "Hunter Thompson's dead. We lost." On Thanksgiving at filmmaker Les Blank's home in Berkeley, I said no to my beloved beer for the last time. Six grueling months later, I emerged alive and mostly sane from a self-imposed, therapist-guided withdrawal from 6 mg/day of doctor prescribed clonazepam. That's enough sedative to knock out a family of four for a good 24 hours. Beware of that evil shit. In the middle of that slow come-down, I rafted the entire Grand Canyon, 150 rapids spread over 280 miles. I will never win an Olympic medal, but I am some kind of Olympian, made of tough survival stuff. I've been sober now nearly two years, not a pill, not a joint, not a drop of booze. In those two years everything has changed. I'm writing again and with a focus like never before. And I'm gearing up to release a lot of the work I've been sitting on for years, some of it decades. Already I've posted dozens of poems that have never seen the light of day. If you've been a fan of my work in the past, get ready. It's gonna be a flood. - Rick McKinney Read This Book! Rick McKinney 1999-2013 All Rights Reserved